Right to be forgotten for mortgage insurance issued to cancer survivors: critical assessment and new proposal

Soetewey et al. (Eur Actuar J 11(1):135–160, 2021) proposed to determine the waiting period opening the right to be forgotten (RTBF) as the time after diagnosis needed for the premium to revert back to some acceptable level expressed by means of regulatory life tables. However, this approach requires data up to 30 years after diagnosis (10 years of standard RTBF plus the typical duration of the loan), or extrapolating the results up to that time horizon. When survival statistics are only available over a shorter duration, it turns out that the results may strongly depend on the extrapolation method. This is why an alternative method is proposed here, based on a constraint imposed to the premium. This constraint is then transposed into a target on the conditional observed survival and the waiting period follows. For the sake of robustness, results obtained with the proposed approach are compared to results obtained with Kaplan–Meier estimate taken as a non-parametric reference. Furthermore, the paper investigates the impact of the stage of the tumor at diagnosis on waiting periods.